Joined-up government is the next digital challenge

Ireland’s public sector has made significant progress on digital transformation, but the next phase will require a fundamental shift in how services are designed and delivered, according to Dera McLoughlin, partner and head of consulting at Forvis Mazars.

“I think Ireland has made very significant progress, but we are now moving into a more challenging phase of digital transformation. The opportunity is no longer simply about putting existing services online. It is about redesigning public services around the needs of citizens and businesses and making the different parts of the State work together much more seamlessly.

“There is strong evidence of progress. Ireland was ranked 7th out of 36 countries in the OECD’s 2025 Digital Government Index, while Ireland was also 4th among EU Member States in the 2025 Open Data Maturity Assessment.

“Ireland’s ambition is also increasing. The Government’s Digital Public Services Plan 2030 targets 100 per cent of key public services being available online by 2030 and 90 per cent of applicable services being consumed digitally. This is a very high bar and an important target. Importantly, it identifies close to 190 key services and proposes organising services around ‘life events’ rather than expecting citizens to navigate the structures of individual departments and agencies.

“I would describe Ireland as having strong foundations and significant momentum, but the next stage will be harder. Success will require integration between public sector bodies, better use of data, modernisation of underlying systems, strong cyber resilience and sustained investment in digital skills.

“Ultimately, the measure of success should not be the number of services that have been digitised. It should be whether dealing with the State becomes materially simpler, faster and more joined-up for the citizen.”

For McLoughlin, data sharing sits at the heart of that ambition, providing the infrastructure needed to make government services genuinely connected rather than simply digitally accessible.

“At present, citizens inevitably experience government through different departments, agencies and local authorities. The longer-term ambition should be that the citizen does not have to understand who they have to go to, how the organs of the state work or those organisational boundaries.

“If someone is dealing with the State at an important point in their life, the service should increasingly be built around that event rather than around the organisational chart designed by government.

“That is exactly the direction of Ireland’s Digital Public Services Plan 2030. Its Life Events model is intended to create integrated services around situations such as becoming a parent, starting school or accessing housing.

“Data is what makes that possible. Ireland has for some time adopted the ‘once-only’ principle, under which public bodies should seek to collect information once and reuse it rather than repeatedly asking citizens and businesses for the same information.

“But data sharing has to be trusted data sharing. It requires governance, common standards, interoperability, security and a clear legal basis.”

Cybersecurity is another area where McLoughlin argues that thinking needs to move beyond the technology function itself.

“ENISA is the EU agency dedicated to enhancing cybersecurity in Europe, and they track cybersecurity events of large incidents by sector. It’s clear from the statistics that they publish that the public sector is, and has been for some time, the sector that is attacked most frequently.

“However, whilst the challenge for the public sector is particularly acute because essential services have to be provided, it’s also compounded by the fact that public sector organisations also hold significant volumes of citizen and other sensitive information.

“The threat environment continues to evolve at the same time as government becomes more dependent on interconnected technology. That means organisations have to manage cyber risk not just within their own infrastructure but across cloud services, suppliers and increasingly AI-enabled systems.

“For me cybersecurity in government is no longer just an IT risk. It is fundamentally a public-service continuity risk.”

The same principle applies to modernising the systems underpinning government services.

“The starting point should therefore be service continuity rather than technology for technology’s sake. Modernisation can then be approached incrementally and in steps, getting the foundations right by moving towards common platforms, reusable components, interoperable systems and modern architectures.

“Simply moving an old process onto new technology does not necessarily constitute transformation and in fact often fails to deliver on promised outcomes.”

Ultimately, McLoughlin says, the transformation depends as much on people as technology.

“Clearly government needs deep technical capability in areas such as cybersecurity, AI, data, cloud and digital architecture. But transformation also requires people who understand service design, change management, procurement, programme delivery, risk and governance.

“The public sector does not need every public servant to become a technologist, but digital, data, cyber and AI literacy increasingly need to become core organisational capabilities.”

View the original article on the Business Post website.